Why Pain Matters
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
- Psalm 8:4
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I John 4:8.
God is love. Yahweh is love. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Peter, John and Paul is love.
No other god is. No other god even claims to be.
“Yahweh is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” - Psalm 103:8.
“For you, O Lord, are kind and forgiving, rich in loving devotion to all who call on you.” - Psalm 86:5.
“Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity and passes over the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance--who does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in loving devotion?” - Micah 7:18.
The God of the Bible is love itself.
The God of the Bible is also a complete sovereign, the One who reigns over all of existence. He is sovereign over chance (Proverbs 16:33), every element of our lives (Proverbs 19:21), the future (James 4:13-15), salvation (Romans 9:15-16), life and death (Deuteronomy 32:39), and anything and everything else (Isaiah 46:9-10, Psalm 115:3, Ephesians 1:11, Job 42:2, Daniel 4:25).
God is love and God rules all.
Let’s focus on just one implication of this incomparable reality.
Because the God of love rules and because the sovereign God loves, your pain matters. Put negatively, if God is not real, then your pain doesn’t matter. At all.
The Bible is not oblivious to the pain, frustration, disappointment and discomfort of the human experience. It is well-acquainted with them. It knows where they come from and it provides the ultimate answer for them.
But Christianity is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It is not an escape hatch. Instead, it provides an opportunity to deal with the brutal, sin-soaked world as it actually is - to see what’s really there and to know the truth about why.
If God does not exist, then our pain is nothing more than a scream into the void. It is, at best, subjective disagreement with a universe that could not care less about you because it doesn’t care at all. Our joys and victories along with our pain and our defeats are nothing more than the random events of a random world randomly unfolding on some random person. There is no purpose and none of it matters.
One of the most prevalent pretexts for the rejection of the existence of God is the reality and depth of pain in this world. “Where is God?” is the great refrain of those who have become embittered towards Him.
What they fail to realize is that the instinctual belief they have that their pain is worth anybody’s attention at all (even their own) is evidence against the case they are trying to build. Like the atheist who claims that great evil must be evidence that a good God could never exist, they borrow from the worldview they are attempting to reject in order to reject it.
If your pain matters - and it does - then it means that there is a God who loves you and rules over the circumstances of your life, even those circumstances that have brought the distress and disappointment into it. God cares, and because He does, you can rest assured that your existence amounts to more than, “Life sucks and then you die.”
We sinners don’t deserve even the scantest amount of attention from a holy God (Romans 3:10-12). How wondrous, then, that we not only receive His attention, but His care and His love, as well.
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“[Cast] all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.” - I Peter 5:7.
“In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From His temple He heard my voice, and my cry to Him reached his ears.” - Psalm 18:6